30 May 2023 1:23 am
Circular Built Environment Playbook to advance regenerative

Circular Built Environment Playbook to advance regenerative

May 5, 2023

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A Circular Built Environment Playbook is most welcome during and at a time of a worldwide overbuilt environment and an omnipresent culture of infinite resources.  It shall be doubly rewarding if this Playbook leads to advance regenerative.  Let us wait and see.

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WorldGBC launches Circularity Accelerator – a groundbreaking global programme to advance circular and regenerative built environments

 

 

 

World Green Building Council (WorldGBC) and its network of over 70 Green Building Councils are #BuildingtoCOP27 by launching Circularity Accelerator — a global programme to accelerate the adoption of circular economy and resource efficiency principles in the building and construction sector.

Last week, the United Nations (UN) reported we have a 50% chance of exceeding 1.5°C of global heating in the next five years. Between the UN Climate Summit of COP21 in Paris and COP26 in Glasgow, the global economy consumed 70% more raw materials than the Earth can safely replenish. [1]

Our planet thrives through circular, natural and regenerative systems, which are being damaged by the impacts of the built environment:

  • The built environment is responsible for 37% of global energy-related carbon emissions, and the construction sector accounts for around 40% of global resource demand every year. By 2050, two thirds of the global population will live in cities, consuming 75% of the world’s natural resources, producing 50% of global waste and over 60% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. [2]
  • Over one-third of the materials used worldwide are for buildings, but less than 9% of global materials consumed are circular, i.e. kept in productive cycles of use. [1]
  • The impact of this resource use-associated GHG emissions and pollution and plunging biodiversity accelerates climate change and the decline of life-sustaining ecosystem services such as the maintenance of clean water and productive soils.

Cristina Gamboa, CEO, WorldGBC, said: 

“The UN has reported we have a 50% chance of exceeding 1.5°C of global heating in the next five years. Over one-third of the materials used globally are for buildings, but less than 9% of global materials consumed are kept in productive cycles of use.

“The impact of this resource use — associated GHG emissions and pollution and plunging biodiversity — accelerates climate change and the decline of life-sustaining ecosystem services such as the maintenance of clean water and productive soils. These impacts unequally affect the most vulnerable communities and economies around the world. But that can and must change.

“To scale the implementation of resource efficiency solutions as we approach COP27, our new Circularity Accelerator programme is already bringing together experts and leaders from across our Green Building Council network to drive the implementation of resource efficiency actions to scale sustainable built environments for everyone, everywhere.”

WorldGBC’s Circularity Accelerator

Circularity Accelerator is a WorldGBC global programme to catalyse the adoption of circular economy and resource efficiency in the building and construction sector.

To tackle the climate and resource impact of the built environment and to support the ambitions of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement, WorldGBC’s Circularity Accelerator convenes the WorldGBC network of 70+ Green Building Councils and their 36,000 members to work towards WorldGBC’s circularity and resource efficiency goals:

– 2030 goal: The sustainable management and efficient use of natural resources within the built environment, achieving zero waste to landfill targets and working towards a built environment with net zero whole life resource depletion

– 2050 goal: A built environment with net zero whole life resource depletion, working towards the restoration of resources and natural systems within a thriving circular economy

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Read more on the World Green Building Council’s article.

The featured image above is the Exchange, designed by Kengo Kuma and Associates. Kengo Kuma and Associates are known for projects examining the association between nature, technology, and human beings. Credit: Anne Czichos / Shutterstock.

Architect seeks pro-climate construction transformation

Nov 26, 2022

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Architect seeks pro-climate construction transformation to be generalised throughout the Middle East and North African regions of heavy urbanisation.  

The above image is of Place Pasteur, Beirut. 

 

French-Lebanese architect seeks pro-climate construction transformation

AFP
Lina Ghotmeh has pegged her career on sustainable construction.

The French-Lebanese architect wants to see her industry transformed by drastically reducing the use of concrete — a major CO2 contributor — using more local materials and reusing existing buildings and materials.

“We need to change our value system,” the 42-year-old told AFP last month.

Lina Ghotmeh wants to reduce the use of concrete in building / © AFP

The aim is to reduce the carbon footprint of the construction industry and create buildings that can better resist the impacts of climate change.

But it’s not an easy battle.

The industry accounts for almost 40 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations.

Ghotmeh, who designed the Estonian National Museum and taught at Yale University, doesn’t advocate for fewer buildings — she knows that’s an unrealistic goal in a world with a growing population.

“That would be like saying ‘stop eating,'” she said.

– ‘Don’t demolish’ –

Instead, we should “keep what already exists, don’t demolish,” but refurbish and retrofit old buildings in a sustainable way where possible.

Building a new detached house consumes 40 times more resources than renovating an existing property, and for a new apartment complex that rises to 80 times more, according to the French Agency for Ecological Transition (Ademe).

RTL

Lina Ghotmeh’s ‘Stone Garden’ in Beirut uses traditional building techniques / © AFP/File

And where new constructions are needed, local materials and design should be used in a way that incorporates natural surroundings and saves energy.

Ghotmeh used more than 500,000 bricks made from local dirt for a new Hermes building in France, expected to open early next year.

The bricks also regulate the building’s temperature and reduce energy needs.

The building will produce as much energy as it consumes, by being made energy efficient and using geothermal power.

– ‘Circular thinking’ –

Architects must, early in the project process, “think in a circular way,” Ghotmeh said, choosing reusable organic or natural materials like wood, hemp, linen or stone.

This shouldn’t stymie the design process either, she insists.

“In Canada, we build wooden towers, in Japan too. It’s a material that is quite capable of being used for tall buildings,” added Ghotmeh, who will build a wooden tower in Paris in 2023.

Another key approach is to build lighter, using less material and fewer toxins.

RTL

Transforming the concrete jungle / © AFP

And then there’s concrete, the main material in so many modern buildings and perhaps the most challenging to move away from.

“We must drastically reduce the use of concrete”, she said, insisting it should only be used for essential purposes, such as foundations and building in earthquake-prone areas.

Some 14 billion cubic metres of concrete are used every year, according to the Global Cement and Concrete Association.

It emits more CO2 than the aviation industry, largely because of the intense heat required to make it.

Alternatives to concrete already exist, such as stone, or making cement — a component of concrete — from calcium carbonate. There are also pushes for low-carbon cement made from iron and steel industry waste.

– Beirut inspiration –

Building more sustainably often comes with a higher price tag — it costs more to double or triple glaze windows and properly insulate a house — but the long-term payoff is lower energy costs.

For Ghotmeh, it’s an imperative investment in our future.

It was her birthplace of Beirut that inspired her to become an architect, spurring a desire to rebuild the so-called “collapsed city” ravaged by war.

RTL

The wall of Ghotmeh’s ‘Stone Garden’ / © AFP/File

In 2020, she completed the “Stone Garden” apartment tower in the city, built with concrete covered with a combed coating, a technique often used by local craftsmen. She used concrete in the construction because of earthquake risks.

The building was strong enough to survive the port explosion in 2020 that destroyed a large part of the city.

And the city continues to inspire her today, even when it comes to climate sustainability.

“Since there is practically only an hour of electricity per day, all the buildings have solar panels now. There is a kind of energy independence which is beginning to take place, by force,” she said.

“Does it take a catastrophe like the one in Lebanon to make this transition?”

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Living materials are the future of sustainable building

Sep 20, 2022

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A Pennsylvania State University RESEARCH on living materials that are the future of sustainable building has elaborated on this aspect of the building materials and / or their combination as illustrated by the above image of Jose Duarte, professor of architecture, and doctoral student Elena Vazquez adjust panels on a prototype of a dynamic window shading system that Vazquez designed and built.  Credit to: Patrick Mansell. All rights reserved.  If this goes through, we could safely say that building sites will look a bit different in the future.

Designed to Adapt: Living materials are the future of sustainable building

A transatlantic partnership explores engineered solutions inspired by nature.

Credit: Penn State / Penn State. 

By David Pacchioli

Working together across disciplines, researchers from Penn State and the University of Freiburg are applying materials that adapt, respond to the environment, self-power, and regenerate to meet the challenges of adaptive architecture.
The coming decades present a host of challenges for our built environments: a rising global population combined with increasing urbanization; crumbling infrastructure and dwindling resources to rebuild it; and the growing pressures of a changing climate, to name a few.

To become more livable for more people, cities themselves will need to become smarter, with buildings, bridges and infrastructure that are no longer static but dynamic, able to adapt and respond to what’s going on around them. If not exactly alive, these structures will need to be life-like, in important ways. And for that, they’ll need to incorporate living materials.

Credit: Penn State. 

“Engineers and scientists have worked for hundreds of years with so-called smart materials,” says Zoubeida Ounaies. “Piezoelectricity was discovered in the 1880s.” Smart materials can sense and respond to their environment, she explains, “but they always need an external control system or source of power. Living materials that adapt, respond to the environment, self-power, and regenerate—in the way that materials in nature do—are the next logical step.”

Ounaies, a professor of mechanical engineering at Penn State, is director of the Convergence Center for Living Multifunctional Material Systems, a research partnership between Penn State and the University of Freiburg in Germany. Known as LiMC2, the center is one of only a handful in the world focused on this emerging field.

A new paradigm: Engineered materials inspired by nature

Living materials, Ounaies explains, are engineered materials that are inspired by nature. Sometimes they even incorporate biological elements. Their dynamic properties, at any rate, enable them to adapt to changes in their environment, responding to external stimuli. They may change shape, heal themselves, even make simple decisions.

Ounaies’s counterpart at Freiburg is Jurgen Ruhe, director of the Cluster of Excellence in Living, Adaptive and Energy-autonomous Materials Systems (livMatS). At a webinar last summer Ruhe put it this way: “If we look at the materials of today, one of the very key features is that materials have properties which do not vary in time. But if we turn our view to nature, nothing is really constant. For living systems, adaptivity is the key to survival. The goal of our livMatS cluster is to generate materials systems which can adapt to changes in the environment based on sensory input and then improve over their lifetime.”

Importantly, Ounaies says, living materials are multifunctional. They don’t just provide strength or elasticity or hardness, they reduce environmental impacts and promote health; they monitor their own status, and when used up they can be recycled or reabsorbed. They harvest energy from their surroundings, store it, and use it for what they need. They do these things, ideally, while self-powering and without external sensors or motors.

Above all, perhaps, engineered living materials aim to be sustainable. “The concept requires us to look at the whole life cycle,” Ounaies says. “To think about the starting material, the extraction and manufacturing processes, the waste generated, the energy required.” The design must account for all. Thus, unlike many smart materials, living materials don’t put a harmful load on the environment.

The Bird of Paradise plant is an example of a natural system whose mechanisms have inspired engineering solutions. A sun-shading system being developed by Thomas Speck and colleagues at the University of Freiburg incorporates its distinct opening and closing movements.  Credit: Sardaka. All Rights Reserved.

“If you think about it,” she says, “adaptive behaviors happen in nature all the time. Maybe not in a material form, but certainly in systems. There are plant systems that do this. There are animals that do this. ” Nature does the original design work. “For example, if one investigates the hierarchical pattern of a mollusk shell or the intricate structure of bird wings, one is inspired to apply them to human made structures in ways that integrate multiple functionalities.”

Thomas Speck has been fascinated by biomimetics for 30 years. Trained as a biophysicist, Speck is now professor of botany at the University of Freiburg. He studies the functional morphology of plants—the relationship between structure and function—and how these “biological role models” might be applied to the world of technology. As director of the University’s Botanic Garden, he has over 6,000 species from which to find his inspiration.

Plants, says Speck, have important lessons to offer. “First, they are mobile, although their movement is often hidden from us,” he explains. “A lot of plant movements are very aesthetic—think of a flower opening. We want to transport this aesthetics into our architectural solutions.”

Element for a fiber-and-concrete pillar being developed for architectural use at the University of Freiburg. Credit: Courtesy: Linnea Hesse, University of Freiburg. All rights reserved

Detail of the interior of Axemann Brewery, Bellefonte, PA, an example of adaptive re-use. Design and construction of the new facility focused on repurposing the existing metal works and features, paying respect to the site’s heritage. Credit: Patrick Mansell. All Rights Reserved.

 

Detail of the interior of Axemann Brewery, Bellefonte, PA, an example of adaptive re-use. Design and construction of the new facility focused on repurposing the existing metal works and features, paying respect to the site’s heritage. Credit: Patrick Mansell. All Rights Reserved.

The livMatS Pavilion at University of Freiburg’s Botanic Garden. A collaboration between Freiburg and the University of Stuttgart, the cottage-sized structure is made of wound flax fiber bundles covered with a waterproof polycarbonate. Credit: IntCDC, University of Stuttgart/Robert Faulkner. All Rights Reserved.

Wound flax fiber bundles that make up the livMatS Pavilion at the University of Freiburg Botanic Garden. Credit: IntCDC, University of Stuttgart/Robert Faulkner. All Rights Reserved.

 

A terminal in Stuttgart’s international airport features tree-like pillars inspired by nature for branching structure and load-bearing strength. Credit: CatalpaSpirit, Wikimedia Commons. All Rights Reserved.

What’s more, Speck says, plants work their magic with a very limited number of structural materials. “Cellulose, hemi-cellulose, lignin, a bit of pectin. Three polysaccharides and one complex polyaromatic polymer. With these materials, which are all relatively easy to recycle, they are able to make fantastic structures, fantastic systems which work incredibly well.”

A simple example is the pine cone, whose paddle-shaped scales open and close in response to changes in environmental humidity. At the Botanic Garden, Speck and his colleagues have analyzed fossilized pinecones 50 million years old and found that they still perform like modern specimens. “And it costs no energy, because humidity changes are brought by sunlight,” he says.

As amazingly robust as the natural mechanism is, the pinecone is merely reactive, Speck notes. “If it’s wet, it’s closed. If it’s dry, it’s open.” In adapting this principle, he says, “We want to design systems that are interactive, that can combine movements, that make decisions. Biomimetics for us means we get inspiration from nature and then reinvent nature. We don’t copy it. We want to combine the best of both worlds: living nature and technics.”

Read more on Penn.uni full article

 

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